WOODLAND PARK, N.J. — Have you ever offered a cherished treasure to someone you love — only to have that person react as if you were trying to give them plutonium?

If so, there’s a good chance that a) you are a Baby Boomer — and, b) the recoiling recipient is your Millennial or Gen X child.

Generally speaking, Boomers, born from 1946 to 1964, have always loved their stuff — and adult children do not want it.

It’s not just the Millennial offspring, also known as Generation Y, whose birth years are variously defined, beginning anywhere from 1977 to the early 1980s and ending from the mid-1990s to 2000. This demographic: famously values experiences over material things; is supposedly “nomadic” by nature; and prefers to live in cramped apartments in urban areas rather than sprawling suburban McMansions (unless, that is, they are saving up money to do so by temporarily residing with their parents in their childhood homes).

Like Millennials, their Generation X predecessors (born from 1965 to 1976, though some end it at 1980) also are passing on the sterling-silver tea sets, Lladro figurines and Grandma’s mahogany breakfront — and being highly selective when it comes to everything else.

Lisa Regal-Dodenhoff, a Baby Boomer whose family has been running the Regal Tag Sales service for decades, sees this trend in her own two 20-something children — as well as their wider generation.

“They’re very much into the retro. They love the '50s, '60s and, like everybody else, IKEA and all the stuff that’s out there, those clean lines,” said Regal-Dodenhoff, noting that what they don’t want is the mahogany, the figurines, crystal, fancy dishes and “all the froufrou stuff that we would have gotten from our parents. ... It’s a whole generation that’s almost doing away with the past.”

The fact that one generation’s treasures are another generation’s trash is bad news indeed for stuffed-to-the-gills Boomers, who now range in age from 52 to 70 and fret about what will become of their family heirlooms and precious possessions should they downsize to smaller digs — or, well, move on to the great beyond.

“My generation, it seems like we took everything. ‘You’re giving away furniture? I’ll take it.'”

Linda Krewer, 69

The big unanswerable question, of course, is: What will ultimately happen to all the unwanted stuff?

“I keep offering stuff to my five kids,” said 69-year-old Linda Krewer of Clifton, N.J., who has taken to posting entreaties to her children about various items on Facebook. “I keep saying to them, ‘Please tell me if you want this?’ And I generally get no response. And then I just say to them, ‘Take it now or deal with it later because that’s what you’ll be doing.’ ”

Her youngest daughter did take some knick-knacks from the family home, Krewer said, and the others “either have a place that’s too small, they have too much of their own stuff, or they don’t want any of my stuff.”

For Boomers — whose Depression Era parents often saved everything from old string to broken pieces of China — such lack of interest or sentiment can be baffling.

“My generation, it seems like we took everything. ‘You’re giving away furniture? I’ll take it,’ ” Krewer said. “I mean, I still have my grandmother’s maple furniture in a bedroom.”

To be sure, you can find exceptions to all this — Boomer minimalists, Millennial sentimentalists and Gen-X pack rats. What’s more: plenty of bric-a-brac still changes hands every day on eBay; shows like American Pickers drive home that some pieces of Americana (old signs, for example) remain highly collectible; and many young entrepreneurs are repurposing dark, out of style furniture, believing that there’s nothing white Chalk Paint can’t fix.

But the move among young folks toward a simpler look is well documented — and has larger implications, for the planet, furniture stores, junk removal services and auction houses.

“They want a simpler lifestyle. They don’t want clutter. They don’t want extra stuff,” said auctioneer Jack Wootton, who, since the mid-1970s has been conducting weekly auctions out of the Boonton feed mill that his grandfather started in 1904 and the family ran for decades.

“I would much rather spend my funds on airline tickets than a sweater.”

Susannah Vila, 31

Research into the tastes and habits of millennials shows that they’re “a generation who do care a lot more about experiences than things,” said Susannah Vila, 31, who co-founded Flip, a business that helps people who want to get out of their leases and those in search of a legal short-term sublet. “And that’s definitely how I’ve been. I would much rather spend my funds on airline tickets than a sweater,” Vial, the daughter of Bob Vila, the original host of This Old House, said.

Millennials, she said, are by nature "nomadic" and do not want to get bogged down with stuff they'll have to pay to move or put into storage.

Noting that mobile devices also allow millennials to capture and save memories in a way that doesn’t require physical space and can be shared, Vila said. “Going to a new place, living in a new place, exploring new things is an opportunity to do that, but it’s also an opportunity to post an awesome photo on Instagram and on Facebook, and when you do that, you get all those memories stored for you, but you also get to share them in real time with your friends.”

Sometimes, young people do make room for a very special piece. Teresa Hessle of Ho-Ho-Kus, N.J., 33, did so after her grandmother — an avid sewer — died. “I took her Singer sewing machine ... ,” Hessle said of the old-style model, with wrought-iron legs. “I actually had it refurbished and it’s a centerpiece now in my living room.”

Monica Ashley, 36, describes her Ho-Ho-Kus home as “a mix between old and new.” She and her husband merged some of his deceased parents’ antique pieces with some more modern pieces. But when Ashley’s parents recently downsized and offered her “pretty pieces,” she declined. “We have no more space. … I think the difference between our generation and theirs is that we’re not going to hold onto pieces of furniture in hopes that maybe in 10 years we’re going to use them.”